LD 1961 
G549 
1889 
Copy 2 


FT MEADE 
GenCol1 


CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 


GEORGETOWN COLLEGE, 


February 21 , 1880, 


MART IN F. MORRIS ESQ. 


WASHINGTON : 

RUFUS H. DARBY, PUBLISHER. 



ADDRESS 

AT THE 














































































































































































































r 




ADDRESS 


AT THE 


CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 


GEORGETOWN COLLEGE, 


February 21, 1880, 


MARTIN F. MORRIS, ESQ. 

t 1 


> • 


WASHINGTON: 

RUFUS H. DARBY, PUBLISHER. 
1889. 







,pj 


ADDRESS. 


In that wonderful Mythology of ancient Greece, 
beautiful even in its grossest anthropomorphism— 
that Mythology which, with the poetry of Homer 
and the drama of Aeschylus, we learned in other days 
within these old gray walls—there is a story which 
I would recall to you, because it has a moral most 
appropriate to the present occasion. It is the story 
of Hercules and Antaeus. Hercules, the wonder¬ 
working demigod of the Achaean legend, met 
Antaeus, King of Libya, and son of Terra or the 
Earth, in deadly conflict on the southern shores of 
the Mediterranean. It was the conflict of force 
and guile against untutored patriotism. The irre¬ 
sistible physical strength of the Achaean enabled 
him repeatedly to throw his antagonist; but each 
time that the Libyan chief touched his Mother 
Earth, he rose reinvigorated by that contact, and 
returned anew to the contest with his adversary ; 
and he perished at last only when that contact was 
no longer available to him. It is good for us, often 
weary, sometimes dispirited, ever struggling with 
the legions of sin and sorrow on the world’s inces¬ 
sant battle-field, to come back from time to time to 
the bosom of our Alma Mater , to the touch of that 
genial mother of our youthful intellects, and from 
the sacred soil, whence we first drew our intellect¬ 
ual and spiritual vigor, to seek anew the strength 
to bear us bravely in the never-ending contest. 



4 


ADDRESS. 


But we come to-day, not merely to seek renewed 
inspiration for ourselves, but also to rejoice with 
our Alma Mater in the consummation of the ages 
that crown her yet youthful brow with the laurels 
of a hundred years. 

One hundred years ago the foundations of her 
greatness were laid. One hundred years ago, 
when the recollections of Valley Forge had already 
become a memory of sweet sadness; when the 
morning star of the nations was ascending brightly 
triumphant over the fainting echoes of the cannon 
atYorktown; when Washington, Franklin, Adams, 
Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and Robert Morris, 
our seven wise men—if, indeed, any can be called 
supremely wise where all were pre-eminently so— 
were laying deep and strong the foundations of 
our Federal Union—in that very same year the 
foundations also were laid of this Republic of the 
Intellect by one who had participated with the 
framers of the Federal Constitution in that heroic 
struggle for human independence—not merely for 
American independence, but for the independence 
of mankind; for the guns of Concord and Lexing¬ 
ton have at length reverberated round the world, 
and their echoes have awakened all the nations 
from their centuries of slavery. 

John Carroll, of Maryland, was the Romulus of 
our University. He was a cousin of the scarcely 
more famous Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the 
man whose signature to the Declaration of Inde¬ 
pendence John Hancock declared to be worth a 
million in money to the patriot cause. He was a 


ADDRESS. 


5 


member of that resolute and heroic band of men 
of whom, now that the passions of the eighteenth 
century are dead, we may speak with something 
of the calm impartiality of history—that band 
which has probably left deeper traces on the his¬ 
tory of the world than any other one organization 
except the Christian Church—the devoted brother¬ 
hood which owes its origin to the chivalrous 
soldier-priest of Navarre, Ignatius of Loyola, and 
bears the name of the Society of Jesus, the most 
bepraised and the most abused organization which 
the world has ever known. 

Little, perhaps, did Loyola anticipate the vast 
dimensions which it was destined to attain, when, 
with his six companions, he formed at Paris, while 
attending the University there in 1534, the wonder¬ 
ful organization which became in after-times alter¬ 
nately the confidant and the terror of kings; which 
gained the undeserved reputation of controlling for 
two centuries one-half of the cabinets of Europe, 
and keeping the other half in constant turmoil; 
which sent the sainted Xavier on the track of 
Vasco De Gama to open to Christianity and Euro¬ 
pean civilization the almost fabulous realms of 
Cipango and Cathay; which established a truly Ar¬ 
cadian republic in Paraguay, and dared death and 
torture in the attempt to civilize the savage aborig¬ 
ines of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi. It is 
beyond question that his organization developed 
the foremost educators of Europe, and the foremost 
missionaries of the world in all the lands beyond 
the pale of European civilization. On the banks 


6 


ADDRESS. 


of the Ganges, in the realms of the Great Mogul, 
at the Court of Pekin, in the wilds of Mongolia, 
through the island-Empire of Japan, by the fount¬ 
ains of the Nile, in the lands where Sheba’s Queen 
reigned three thousand years ago, amid the bound¬ 
less forests of South America, in thfe halls of Cuzco, 
amid the fallen palaces and ruined temples of the 
Montezumas, by our own great inland waters, 
everywhere amid the nations that walked in the 
shadow of an idolatrous worship or groaned in the 
throes of an expiring civilization, they carried in 
either hand the twin torches of education and relig¬ 
ion, like that noble light which flashes out from the 
seaward gate of cur Western Continent upon the 
broad Atlantic to illumine the world. 

When, with a spirit of fierce intolerance, upon 
which we now look back with pity and regret 
rather than abhorrence, England harshly drove 
from her soil the Puritan and the Cavalier alike, 
Catholic and Protestant, the peaceful Quaker and 
the scarcely more aggressive Anabaptist, it was the 
Jesuit missionaries that accompanied the pilgrims 
of the Ark and the Dove to their settlement at old 
St. Mary’s on the Potomac, where, as we claim, not 
in any spirit of antagonism, but only of a generous 
emulation, freedom first planted in the New World 
the banner of universal religious toleration and pro¬ 
claimed the doctrine of the brotherhood of man. 
And when again, in the consummation of time, in 
the due course of human events, the struggle for 
independence began, the brotherhood of Loyola 
entered heartily into the patriotic movement; and 


ADDRESS. 


7 


not the least prominent actor in it was the founder 
of Georgetown College. 

We know how highly the Continental Congress 
valued his services and his influence at that criti¬ 
cal time. It was of great importance to our peo¬ 
ple to secure the alliance, or at least the neutrality, 
of Canada in their contest with the mother coun¬ 
try ; and the Congress appointed Benjamin Frank¬ 
lin, Charles Carroll, and Samuel Chase as commis¬ 
sioners to treat with our Anglo-French neighbors 
to the north of us. But it was not so much upon 
these commissioners that Congress relied for suc¬ 
cess in this negotiation as upon John Carroll, whose 
co-operation in this delicate mission the Congress 
solicited in terms rather of entreaty than request; 
and upon John Carroll, in fact, the work of nego¬ 
tiation mainly devolved. The mission was more 
successful than is usually supposed. The assist¬ 
ance or alliance of Canada, it is true, was not se¬ 
cured to the thirteen colonies. The bitter enmities 
of two centuries of strife and conflict it was im¬ 
possible so far to remove as to bring Canada into 
an alliance which would place her side by side with 
New England. She had no such grievance as the 
revolted colonies had, and she had been guaranteed 
civil and religious freedom; and the guarantee, it 
must be said, had been faithfully preserved. John 
Carroll, however, did secure the substantial neu¬ 
trality of the French Canadians; and it is a fact 
that very few of them were found in the armies 
of Clinton and Burgoyne. 

With the end of the War of Independence the 


8 


ADDRESS. 


work of political organization began, and John 
Carroll and his associates began simultaneously 
the work of ecclesiastical and educational organi¬ 
zation. The first fruits of his labors were the 
foundation of the episcopal see of Baltimore, of 
which he became the first bishop ; and the estab¬ 
lishment of Georgetown College. How the tree 
then planted has grown you need no words from 
me to tell. The result is before you. The modest 
structure erected here by John - Carroll has long 
since given way to the magnificent buildings that 
now crown this hill, and the intellectual develop¬ 
ment has been no less marked that has drawn 
students to Georgetown College even from the 
nations of Europe and Asia, and spread the influ¬ 
ence of our Alma Mater to the ends of the earth. 
That influence, it is true, has been quietly exerted 
and quietly disseminated. The Alumni of George¬ 
town College have not been as loud in the praises 
of their Alma Mater as they would have been jus¬ 
tified to be; and she has been satisfied—perhaps 
too well satisfied—to be known by her works 
rather than her professions. 

During the century of our Alma Mater s exist¬ 
ence she has seen empires rise and fall. She saw 
the savage feudalism of Europe go down in blood 
before the still more savage vengeance of the 
French Revolution. She saw the Corsican Con¬ 
queror throw the lurid light of his meteoric career 
across the field of history. She listened intently 
to the distant sounds of triumph that went up from 
the field of old Plataea to soothe the dying hour of 


ADDRESS. 


9 


Marco Bozzaris. The south winds brought to her 
expectant ears the news of the victories of Hidalgo 
and Bolivar. She responded with the stirring 
strains of the Marseillaise to the announcement 
of the Republic of Lamartine and Cavaignac. 
She has seen our own thirteen feeble States be¬ 
come the mightiest of empires. She has seen 
yonder Capitol rise to crown a hill more regal than 
that whereon the Roman raised the seat of ancient 
sovereignty. For a time her brow was clouded 
and grief was in her halls, while /paternal strife 
scattered her sons and desolated the land. But 
she has seen the new Union grow up from the 
strife; and she rejoices that we are once more a 
united and prosperous people. 

During this century of her existence she has wit¬ 
nessed the most wonderful progress in all the condi¬ 
tions of society. During this century the steamboat, 
the railroad, the telegraph, and the telephone have 
been invented; the continent has been spanned; 
the mountains have been pierced; the ocean has 
been bridged. Morse’s vocal wire has come to 
flash the deeds and the thoughts of men from land 
to land, under the deep sea, through mountain and 
forest, from city to city, through all the wide world, 
with the speed of lightning. The newspaper has 
arisen to mould public opinion, as well as to chron¬ 
icle its chameleon phases. Gigantic enterprises 
have been achieved by combination which individ¬ 
ual effort could never have realized. Communities 
and nations have been brought into closer rela¬ 
tions. The question of the brotherhood of man is no 


10 


ADDRESS. 


longer a dream of the enthusiast. Man’s comforts 
and man’s wants have been multiplied a thousand¬ 
fold. And social and political questions have arisen 
of which the sages and statesmen of other days 
never dreamed. What Virgil said of the Augustan 
Age that ushered in the Messianic era, in words 
borrowed from the Sibylline Oracles, is as applica¬ 
ble to our century as it was to that of the Roman 
poet: 

“ Ultima Cumaei venit jam carminis aetas; 

Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.” 

“ Comes now the final time foretold 
By the Cumsean song of old: 

New the great cycle of the years 
Begins through all the rolling spheres.” 

In truth a new era has begun. The age of great 
men has passed; the age of great things has come. 
Man has become greater; men have become less. 
Individual effort is dwarfed before the overwhelm¬ 
ing power of combination. The secrets of the ma¬ 
terial universe are laid bare. New forces and new 
powers are daily discovered for the use of man; 
and man himself is dazzled by his wonderful dis^ 
coveries; and he begins to wonder what the end is 
and meaning of it all. At the same time the com¬ 
motion of his material progress has unsettled all 
his ancient beliefs and all his intellectual condi¬ 
tions. Agnosticism, socialism, communism, and 
nihilism, are making war upon all his accepted tra¬ 
ditions and upon all the political and social institu¬ 
tions that have come down to him through the ages 
as the sacred heritage of humanity. And, as if this 


ADDRESS. 


11 


were not enough, the conflict of the races has been 
precipitated upon us in the vain attempt to give 
political expression to the beautiful theory of 
human equality. The Mongolian is at our gates. 
The African is in our citadel. And it is demanded 
of us that we be just to them, while we guard the 
integrity of our own Aryan race and of our own 
Aryan civilization—the most difficult problem 
which the world has ever yet been called upon to 
solve. 

In all this ferment of the human mind—in all 
this struggleof the social and political world—what 
part shall the university take in the determination 
of the many complex problems that are presented 
to us for our solution ? What is the place of the 
university in the plan of our modern civilization ? 
This is the question which it seems to me I might 
appropriately discuss with you a few brief minutes 
on this occasion of our Centennial reunion. 

There was a time when the great universities of 
Europe were the arbiters of public opinion, and 
exercised the most potent influence on the social, 
civil, and political life of the world. They were 
the teachers of the nations; and kings and popes, 
and princes and prelates, vied with each other to 
do them honor. The ministers of religion, and the 
statesmen who assumed to guide the destinies of 
Europe, were educated in their halls, and the de¬ 
grees of the university were more prized than the 
baton of a Constable of France. They preserved, 
and with the religious institutions engrossed, all 


12 


ADDRESS. 


that remained of the learning of antiquity. They 
were the depositories of the theology of Paul of 
Tarsus and of Augustine, the philosophy of Aris¬ 
totle and Boethius, the jurisprudence of Gratian 
and Trebonian, the medical science of Galen and 
Hippocrates. And when the Renaissance came, 
and the literature of Rome—“ Tully’s lore and 
Virgil’s lay and Livy’s pictured page ”—was sup¬ 
plemented by the grander literature of Greece, the 
magnificent epic of Homer, and the dramatic 
grandeur of HCschylus and Sophocles, and the 
lyric beauties of Sappho and Anacreon and Pin¬ 
dar, and the eloquent periods of Thucydides and 
Demosthenes, became the almost exclusive prop¬ 
erty of the universities. 

Wom^n, too, found in those great institutions a 
career which is scarcely allowed to her even in this 
day of complete emancipation, and the beautiful 
Hypatia of Alexandria had many a counterpart 
among the professors of the great universities of 
France and Italy. 

The university of the Middle Ages was a won¬ 
derful institution. It was a republic in itself, a 
true republic with republican institutions, liberated 
from the feudal surroundings of the time, with its 
own government and its own civil and criminal 
jurisprudence, and its own courts to administer 
that jurisprudence. Its students were often num¬ 
bered by the tens of thousands, divided into their 
separate nations, and with their separate colleges 
within the common enclosure, and subject to the 
common authority of the university selected by 


ADDRESS. 


13 


themselves. A remarkable survival of its powers 
and privileges is the right exercised to-day by the 
English universities of Oxford and Cambridge to 
be represented in the English Parliament by their 
own chosen representatives—a privilege which 
has never been disturbed in any of the successive 
reforms that have swept over England in the pres¬ 
ent century. 

Old Salerno was the first of all the schools of the 
Middle Ages and of modern Europe. On the shores 
of Campania, where the blue waters of the Medi¬ 
terranean come in to the very base of the vine- 
clad hills—where in ancient times “the glory that 
was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome/’ 
Hellenic culture and Latin strength, met and were 
blended—where, in subsequent ages, Byzantine 
guile and Saracen fanaticism, the white banners 
of Anjou and the red cross of Aragon, contended 
for dominion—the school of Salerno rose, and drew 
its inspiration alike from East and West, from 
ancient Greece and still more ancient Egypt, from 
Byzantium and from Arabian Cordova. It became 
the great seat of medical science, and the greatest 
school of medicine which the world has ever known; 
and its medical code, which the Middle Ages accepted 
as the supreme law of the science, is even to-day 
entitled to our most profound admiration. It had a 
most remarkable influence on the civilization of 
Europe. 

It is a fact that deserves recognition from us, 
that the first attempts in all ages to establish what 
we would designate as a university education 


14 


ADDRESS. 


have always been connected with the predominant 
study of the science of medicine. With man first 
emerging from degradation or barbarism, the law 
of nature would dictate that his first effort should 
be in the direction of the security of his own physi¬ 
cal well-being. 

Salerno, however, was rather a school than a 
university, in the sense in which we now use that 
word. The first of the universities properly so 
called was Bologna. It became the great centre 
for the study of law —utriusque juris, as the Latin 
has it—the two laws, the civil law of ancient Rome 
and the canon law of the Roman Church, whence 
is derived the degree of LL,D., of Doctor of the 
Two Laws, which the University of Bologna was 
the first to confer. It became, and remained down 
to the latest times, the focus of free thought in 
Italy and the seminary of republican principles— 
the necessary consequence, most undoubtedly, of 
its study of jurisprudence. For law is necessarily 
opposed to arbitrary power and feudal licentious¬ 
ness; and the true lawyer can never be the enemy 
of a people’s liberties. 

From Bologna came forth the inspiration that 
led to the establishment of the Italian Republics 
of the Middle Ages—to the glory of Florence and 
Genoa, the restoration of the civil law of Rome 
throughout Western Europe, and the growth of 
the great free cities both on the Mediterranean and 
on the Baltic Sea. And the spirit of freedom is 
not yet dead in the old Roman city, although the 


ADDRESS. 


15 


pre-eminence of its university has long since de¬ 
parted. 

Almost contemporaneous in its origin with 
Bologna was the University of Paris, the greatest 
of all the universities of the world—the school of 
Abelard, Anselm, Roscelin, Richard of St. Victor, 
Peter Lombard, and Thomas Aquinas—the great 
home of the scholastic philosophy, which kept 
alive the intellect of Europe when the feudal barons 
would have destroyed it—a power in Europe to 
which popes and kings and emperors deferred—a 
power which almost became the arbiter of ortho¬ 
dox Christianity—whose decrees were as the de¬ 
crees of councils, and whose dogmatic utterances 
were accepted as the most authentic enunciations 
of philosophic truth. 

These were the greatest of the universities; but 
they were only three out of the many which kept the 
lamp of science burning through the feudal ages and 
through all the ages of discord and strife. Their 
influence on Europe it is scarcely possible to con¬ 
ceive at this day. They were the castles and the 
strongholds of civilization against the castles and 
strongholds in which the feudal barons and the 
enemies of freedom had entrenched themselves; 
and they were the instrumentalities of Providence 
to transmit to modern times all that was left of the 
old Greek and Roman and Judean civilization, 
learning, and literature. 

Most of the old universities were swept away by 
the French Revolution. Much that was good, as 
well as more that was bad, was washed out in that 


16 


ADDRESS. 


terrible baptism of blood. A new civilization arose, 
with new ideas and new aspirations. Almost a 
diluvian cataclysm intervened between the centu¬ 
ries that went before and the nineteenth ceutury. 
A new world has arisen out of the ruins of the old; 
and the nations are moving forward on new lines 
unknown before. Is the university qualified to 
hold aloft the torch of truth to guide humanity to 
the goal of its new aspirations; or must it abandon 
the leadership of the new civilization ? Is its sys¬ 
tem antiquated and useless, and fitted rather to 
disqualify us for the active work of our age than 
to promote the cause of human progress ? As it is 
sometimes intimated to us, should we not leave the 
dead languages, with the dead philosophy of the 
schools, to be buried with the dead religions and the 
discarded idols of the past ? Does not our age de¬ 
mand newer methods and different instrumentali¬ 
ties ? 

The principal religion of our time is Materialism, 
and Mammon is the chief divinity in its Pantheon. 
The acquisition of money is the supreme goal of 
human effort. To this great purpose all other con¬ 
siderations seem to be subordinated, and success 
in the endeavor oftentimes condones all the crimi¬ 
nal methods by which it has been achieved. Even 
the sciences which are commended to us are chiefly 
the material sciences. The sweet humanities of 
literature are relegated to the obscurity from which 
they first emerged, or are regarded merely as the 
amusement of an idle moment; and even success¬ 
ful ignorance is sometimes lauded as the best de- 


ADDRESS. 


17 


velopment of our modern manhood. The self- 
made man, so called, is the idol of our time; and 
the self-made man, who is thus held up to us for 
our admiration, is usually a compound in equal 
parts of ignorance and self-sufficiency. 

And yet, while this low spirit of materialism is 
prevalent in the land, there are remarkable indica¬ 
tions of a strong counter-current in favor of a 
return to the higher education. Are there not col¬ 
leges and universities, so called, spread broadcast 
over the country, dozens of them to every State ? 
Are there not new universities projected every day, 
as if, like Jonah’s gourd, they could spring up into 
maturity in a night ? Does not even Plutus often 
pay tribute to learning by devoting some of his 
millions to erect temples to literature ? And have 
not even misers sought to atone for their hardness 
of heart to the living by linking their names, when 
dead, to the posthumous monuments which they 
have directed their executors to raise to education ? 
Is not all this the harbinger of a newer and better 
spirit, and of a higher and better appreciation of 
the culture that is needed to save the social system 
from impending disaster? 

It has long since been recognized by all true 
statesmen and by all thinking men that the wel¬ 
fare, and even the very existence, of a republic 
depend on the combined virtue and intelligence 
of its citizens; and that, to the extent that either 
intelligence or virtue is wanting, the republic is 
in danger. The absence of either one will beget 
an aristocracy, either of force or of fraud, an 


18 


ADDRESS. 


aristocracy of the sword or an aristocracy of 
wealth. The absence of both inevitably leads to 
Csesarism and monarchy. The bribes of Philip of 
Macedon sufficed to overthrow the Anthenian 
democracy, in spite of the patriotism of Phocion 
and the fervid eloquence of Demosthenes, because 
Athenian virtue was dead, although Athenian in¬ 
telligence still lived and flourished. The Empire 
of the Caesars, the vilest and worst under which 
the human race has ever groaned, was the immediate 
result of the loss of Roman virtue and of the 
aggregation of an overwhelming mass of ignorant 
voters to the Roman Commonwealth. It is un¬ 
questionably true that if republics would perpetuate 
themselves they must promote the virtue and 
foster the education of their citizens, 

Are we promoting the virtue of our people when 
we condone the crimes of bribery and corruption— 
when we make the offices of government the spoil 
of successful partisanship—when we abandon the 
management of our public affairs to the ruffians 
and the outlaws of society—when we seek to 
nationalize the infamous scandal of the divorce 
laws—when we smile at successful political trickery, 
even though a nation's guest or the ambassador 
of a friendly power should be its victim—when 
we permit our municipalities to be governed by 
the criminal classes and conducted on the princi¬ 
ples of Robin Hood and Robert Macaire ? Are 
we promoting the intelligence of our people when 
we appeal to their passions and prejudices instead 
of their judgments, to the blind insanity of sec- 


ADDRESS. 


19 


tional hatred, or the more dangerous prejudice of 
foreign nationality—when we add to the mass of 
imperfectly educated emigrants from other lands, 
whom we strive to assimilate, a denser mass of 
disorganized ignorance, which it is impossible to 
assimilate—when the beautiful theory of universal 
suffrage is used to degrade the powers of govern¬ 
ment into the hands of the worst elements of 
society—when the honored principle of the rule of 
the majority, from which should be evolved the 
greatest good of the greatest number, becomes 
merely a cloak for that worst of tyrannies, the 
tyranny of a mob ? 

There is a very prevalent political philosophy 
that all these evils will right themselves in the 
course of time. But evil does not generate good ; 
excess begets excess ; and as sure as the sun shines 
in the heaven, in spite of the wonderful elasticity 
of our composite race, political corruption must 
eventuate in national degradation, civil decay, and 
Csesarism. For the want of education, we fail to 
see that we are repeating humanity’s sad story, 
and that the causes that overthrew the republics 
of Israel, and of Athens, and of Rome, and the 
republics of Italy, and of the Netherlands, are pre¬ 
cisely the same causes that are to-day sapping the 
foundations of our own free institutions. Truly, 
we need the higher education here, the education 
not alone of the intellect, but equally of the heart, 
to enable us to see and appreciate the danger and 
to guard against it before it is too late. We need 
the education both of the intellect and the heart; 


20 


ADDRESS. 


for the former without the latter may make us 
accomplished criminals; the latter without the 
former is likely to produce only amiable idiots. 
The combination of both is needed to make the 
useful citizen and the perfect man. 

To that illustrious philosopher and statesman, 
Francis Lord Bacon, is attributed the somewhat 
trite aphorism, that “knowledge is power.” It is 
of no consequence that he did not say it—at least 
in so many words. He might have said it, as he 
might probably have written the works of William 
Shakespeare ; and the aphorism is eminently the 
expression of a great truth. There is a subtle 
power in knowledge to which ignorance can never 
hope to attain. Ignorance is timid ; knowledge is 
strong. Ignorance is blind ; knowledge can foresee 
consequences, and gaze into the future of human 
conduct. The pursuit of knowledge is a passion 
ineradicably implanted in the human heart; and 
even though knowledge does not always bring 
present happiness, but very frequently the reverse, 
we might as well attempt to turn the mighty Mis¬ 
sissippi back from its course or chain the torrent 
of Niagara, as to stay the human intellect in its 
pursuit of knowledge. Indeed, the very existence 
of this insatiate passion, coupled with the absolute 
impossibility of its complete gratification within the 
span of this finite existence, is by far the most 
potent reason drawn from natural sources for the 
belief in the immortality of the soul. It is not for 
us to attempt to stay that passion, but to guide 
and direct it. 


ADDRESS. 


21 


Knowledge is power ; and knowledge is the re¬ 
sult of education. In education all thoughtful 
men now see the only remedy for the evils of our 
time, and the only solution for the many problems 
that perplex us. 

But even those who laud it most do not tell us 
how education is to solve these problems—how 
education is to bridge the widening chasm between 
capital and labor, or to reconcile the growing con¬ 
flict between co-operative combination and indi¬ 
vidual freedom, or to fuse radically antagonistic 
races into one homogeneous people. Intelligence 
is not itself a remedy, nor does it even immediately 
supply the remedy. We know our difficulties now 
as well as they can be known in the future, and 
the knowledge does not supply us with the means 
for their solution. Neither is it the intelligent who 
have always been the most virtuous, and ignorance 
has not always been the worst enemy of our race. 
The intelligence that will crowd the public places 
of your National Capital with brazen statues of 
men on horseback, and leave the statesmen and 
the philanthropists and the scholars of the country 
unremembered and unhonored, is a greatly more 
dangerous thing than the untutored simplicity of 
the backwoodsman, or even the benighted ignor¬ 
ance of a duly qualified juryman. The world’s 
worst and most dangerous men are the Csesars, the 
Robespierres, and the Bonapartes—the men of in¬ 
telligence and education without honor and virtue 
—the men who, by that combination of gift and 
deficiency, are enabled most lavishly to do on earth 


22 


ADDRESS. 


the work of hell, and bring untold misery on their 
fellow-men. The bloodiest ruffianism of the French 
Revolution emanated from men of education and 
women of supposed refinement—from the philoso¬ 
phers, so called, who had learnt their philosophy 
in the school of Rousseau and Voltaire, with whom 
honor was a jest and virtue a fable. The best 
educated sovereign that has ever occupied the 
throne of England from the Norman Conquest to 
the present day, was the brutal tyrant, Henry VIII. 
Timur was one of the most learned of Asiatic rulers. 
And our own country has produced no more ac¬ 
complished man than Aaron Burr. 

There is not only an intellectual side to the human 
mind—there is also the sentimental side. I use 
the word in the most comprehensive and most proper 
sense. No less a judge of men than Napoleon 
Bonaparte said that imagination governed the 
world—meaning thereby the spiritual and senti¬ 
mental faculties in man—and he was undoubtedly 
right. It was upon this theory that most of his 
own good deeds, and many of his bad ones, were 
based. Upon this theory he founded the Legion 
of Honor. Upon this theory, himself an agnostic, 
he restored the rites of religion in France. Upon 
this theory he sought to dazzle the world rather 
by the splendor than the solidity of his enterprises. 
It is the sentimental, not the intellectual, that is 
sublime; and it is the sentimental and the sublime, 
not the merely intellectual, that governs the great 
heart of humanity. How much more man is 
moved by sentimental than by intellectual consid^ 


ADDRESS. 


23 


erations, even when the intellectual faculties are 
expended upon the sublimest of all the physical 
sciences, astronomy, let the poet of the Pleasures 
of the Imagination tell in lines that are themselves 
as sublime as any in our language: 

“ Look then abroad through nature to the range 
Of planets, suns, and adamantine spheres 
Wheeling unshaken through the void immense; 

And speak, oh! man, does this capacious scene 
With half that kindling majesty dilate 
Thy strong conception, as when Brutus rose 
Refulgent from the stroke of Caesar’s fate, 

Amid the crowd of patriots; and his arm 
Aloft extending, like eternal Jove, 

When guilt brings down the thunder, called aloud 
On Tully’s name, and shook his crimson steel, 

And bade the father of his country hail: 

For lo! the tyrant prostrate in the dust, 

And Rome again is free!” 

It is true that mankind are moved more by their 
sentimental emotions than by the intellect. And 
yet they are right who look to education for the 
solution of all our social problems. For, although 
this is a confession of present inability and inca¬ 
pacity, it is a reaching in the true direction for the 
truth and light which are not yet within their 
grasp. Our sentimental natures require even a 
more careful training than does its intellectual 
counterpart; and on the combined training of the 
head and heart depend alike the welfare of the 
individual and the welfare of the state. 

Is the modern university equal to the demands 
of this system of supreme development? 


24 


ADDRESS. 


Never at any time in the history of the world, 
despite its materialistic tendencies, has the value 
of education been more highly rated than it is now. 
But never at any time has there been greater 
controversy in respect of the character of the edu¬ 
cation that is best suited to the exigencies of the 
time. There is, on the one hand, an emphatic de¬ 
nial of the utility of what is known as a “liberal 
education;” and, on the other hand, there is a re¬ 
markable multiplication of the institutions which 
profess to give it—a multiplication unfortunately 
in itself an element of weakness, since it is a diffu¬ 
sion of strength when success depends greatly on 
concentration of effort—and yet an indication of 
the necessity of a higher mental cultivation. 

“ Liberal ” means free, in the language from 
which the word is derived; and a liberal education 
is the education of freemen—the education that 
frees the mind alike from the slavery of ignorance 
and the tyranny of the passions. Without such an 
education there can be no intelligent participation 
in the functions of government that are devolved 
alike upon all citizens of the Republic. 

But such an education, it may be said, is not open to 
all; and, not being open to all, it can not be regarded 
as essential to the welfare of the community as a 
whole. 

When “the hewers of wood and the drawers of 
water” learn to read the pages of Homer and De¬ 
mosthenes, and to hold high converse with the 
highest on the abstruse questions of science and 
philosophy, there will no longer be “hewers of 


ADDRESS. 


25 


wood and drawers of water,” and the millennium 
will have come. Yet it may be that, in the ages 
which are yet to be unfolded, our increasing knowl¬ 
edge of the secrets of nature may enable us to es¬ 
cape much of the drudgery that is now the daily 
fate of the vast majority of mankind, and place the 
whole race on a higher plane of intelligence. But 
it is too much to hope that, until the millennium is 
ushered in, a liberal education will be within reach 
of more than a small minority. 

It is this small minority that is to leaven the 
mass. All free government, however democratic 
in theory, is necessarily aristocratic in fact. The 
few must always administer it; the few must 
always guide and control it. The guaranty of 
freedom is that these few are not permanently 
entrenched behind the frowning ramparts of 
privilege, but are subject to change; that the men 
of to-day are not the men of yesterday, and that 
it is always in the power of the majority to discard 
the old and appoint new administrators of the 
powers of government. 

The great universities of the Middle Ages were 
the nurseries of freedom, never the abettors of 
despotism; and from them came forth the chosen 
few whose influence diffused the principles of 
liberty among the people and kept alive that spirit 
which enabled the enslaved nations finally to break 
the fetters of feudalism. Why should it not be 
to-day as it was in times past ? Why should not 
the university be the conserver as well as the nurse 
of freedom ? 


26 


ADDRESS. 


It is a singular fact that, notwithstanding the 
extension of constitutional government in Europe, 
and apparently in pursuance of it, both education 
and religion have been made concerns of state by 
nearly all the nations of the continent, and every 
cabinet has a minister of public worship and pub¬ 
lic instruction. Usually the two subjects are 
combined under the supervision of one ministerial 
department. In the very beginning of our Federal 
Union we separated the domain of religion from 
that of politics; and it is one of the cardinal prin¬ 
ciples of our republican institutions that every 
man should be free to worship God as he pleases, 
or not to worship him at all if he so prefers, pro¬ 
vided he does not offend against public decorum. 
But our views in regard to the control of the state 
over education are not by any means as well de¬ 
fined as with regard to the freedom of religious 
worship, and by many persons it has been deemed 
wise statesmanship not only that the state should 
encourage education—about which there is no reas¬ 
onable controversy—but even that it should assume 
to itself the direct and immediate management of 
it; that it should have its own schools and uni¬ 
versities, appoint its own teachers, and prescribe 
its own course of study. 

Now, if there is anything well defined in our 
theories of government it is that the principle of 
paternalism is radically vicious, and that the 
state should not attempt to do for us what we can 
as well do for ourselves. Government is merely a 
policeman, and its sole duty is to keep the peace 


ADDRESS. 


27 


between us while we work out our own destinies, 
each in his own way. Its commandments are 
exclusively negative; positive duties it should leave 
to our consciences and the laws that govern con¬ 
science. Whenever it goes beyond this limit the 
tendency of its action is always in the direction of 
socialism and communism, and every such de¬ 
parture from its normal sphere is a confession of 
weakness on the part of individual man that de¬ 
tracts from the native dignity of our manhood; it 
is a return to the monarchical principle which we 
repudiated by our Declaration of Independence. 

If this be the true theory of government the man¬ 
agement of the education of the people is as far 
beyond its proper sphere as is the control of relig¬ 
ion. Indeed, a system of education controlled 
and managed by politicians is such an incongruity? 
that, when the proposition is stated in all its bald¬ 
ness, we are disposed to wonder how we could ever 
think of receiving our mental and moral training 
from the politicians, any more than we would at 
this day think of accepting our religious creed 
from the privy council of an English sovereign. 
The control which the cabinets of Europe attempt 
to exercise over the subjects of education and relig¬ 
ion is but the last desperate attempt of the enemies 
of freedom to convert both into engines of despot¬ 
ism. By indirection, it is true, the state can and 
should foster the cause of education, as it can and 
should foster the cause of religion and morality ; 
but it is not the province of the state to build 
schools for us that we^could compete with the great 


28 


ADDRESS. 


universities of the past in their influence, or that 
could worthily develop the spirit of individual free¬ 
dom and true manhood. 

It is not to be forgotten that the altered conditions 
of society have superinduced the necessity for great 
changes in the methods heretofore prevalent in 
various branches of education. Formerly the stu¬ 
dent of law or medicine had no other school than 
the office of some member of the profession in the 
active practice of it; and his education was only 
such as he he could “ pick up.” There were no 
schools of law or medicine. The medical man was 
compelled to go to the schools of Continental Europe 
for his higher education, if he desired any ; and the 
lawyer had to do without it, because in the com¬ 
mon law there was no higher education to be had. 
We may recall the attempt to establish a school for 
the common law at Oxford before the middle of 
the last century, the first outcome of which was 
the immortal work of Blackstone. But it never 
did anything else, and it finally died of inanition— 
although the study of law has been restored in that 
ancient university during the present century, and 
with better success. 

The apprentice system, in fact, for a long time 
afforded the only access to these two learned pro¬ 
fessions; as it did, in a somewhat different way, 
to the various trades and mechanical industries. 
The trades-unions destroyed the system in the lat¬ 
ter case; and the advancement of civilization had 
the same result with respect to law and medicine, 
necessitating the substitution of the law school and 
the medical college for the private preceptor. 


ADDRESS. 


29 


So the university has become the sole dispensa¬ 
tory of all liberal education, and upon it conse¬ 
quently has devolved a more profound responsibility 
than, in England or the United States, ever rested 
upon it before. It has become the guardian of our 
municipal freedom, because it is the foster-mother 
of our intellectual and sentimental nature. It has 
become its duty to teach us the principles of truth 
and justice by which our manhood’s years are to 
be guided in our relations to our fellow-men. It 
has become its duty to teach us to reason rightly; 
to direct us to distinguish between truth and 
sophistry, and to impress our spiritual natures with 
the visions of beauty that hover over the poet’s 
pages, and the principles of honor and patriotism 
that breathe in the impassioned eloquence of the 
orator. It is its prerogative to introduce us to 
that most wonderful literature which the world 
has ever known—the literature which has given 
to us Homer’s immortal epics, with their lessons of 
fervid patriotism and their illustrations of the ad¬ 
vantage of local sovereignty, under a great fed¬ 
eral union, which was the old Achaean state—the 
literature which has encompassed all beauty and 
comprehended all philosophy—the literature which 
has left its indelible traces upon our thought and 
speech and taste for all time—the literature with¬ 
out which our modern science can scarcely think ; 
for its nomenclature is nearly all Greek, and it 
can make no great invention for which it is not 
compelled to borrow or coin a Grecian name. It 
is the province of the university to teach us the 
philosophy of history, the lesson which is to be 


30 


ADDRESS. 


learned from the experience of our race, the lesson 
which our self-sufficient age seems most unwilling 
to learn and to its ignorance of which it may at¬ 
tribute all its blunders. It is the province of the 
university to teach political economy, the true 
science of our social existence and of the relation 
to each other of the component parts of the social 
system. The glories of Salerno and Bologna are 
no more; but it is the province of the university 
now, as it was their province in their day, to ex¬ 
pound the sciences of medicine and jurisprudence, 
the theory of the reparation of man’s physical 
woes, and the theory of the regulation of man’s 
moral and intellectual weakness. It is the province 
of the university, too, while not descending in the 
slightest degree from the high plane in which she 
has placed those studies that have been peculiarly 
her own for generations, to prosecute with en¬ 
larged wisdom the material sciences that have 
come in our age so greatly to widen the sphere of 
human knowledge and to increase the sum of 
human happiness. All beauty and duty and truth 
it is hers to develop; hers it is by all the roads of 
human knowledge to lead us into the appreciation 
of all that is best and highest within the grasp of 
the human intellect. 

Let me turn for a moment to another considera¬ 
tion. 

It was a cherished dream of the Father of his 
Country, one of the very few dreams in which he 
permitted his eminently practical mind to indulge, 
to see this Federal Capital that was to bear his 
name become the seat of a great university. Jef- 


ADDRESS. 


31 


ferson had laid the foundations of the University 
of Virginia; and he was as justly proud of it as 
he was of being the author of the Declaration of 
Independence. Washington would gladly have 
been the founder in his own city of the University 
of America. He had not himself to any great extent 
the advantages of a university education; but with 
the prophetic eye of the patriot and the statesman, 
he saw that here, on the banks of his own beautiful 
river, there was to be not only the seat of empire, 
the seat of a great Republican Empire, vastly 
grander, indeed, than even he had ever dreamed, 
but also the centre of science and art and litera¬ 
ture for America, the centre from which should 
radiate the light to illumine all the body politic— 
the heart fr$m which should flow the blood through 
all the veins of our young Republic’s intellectual 
life. And this idea had been more than once 
revived by men of eminence in the world of litera¬ 
ture. 

But are we not realizing the dream of Wash¬ 
ington ? Is not our sister university, the Colum¬ 
bian, aiding to realize it ? Institutions grow; they 
are not made. They do not spring up in a night, 
perhaps to vanish like an exhalation before the 
morning sun. Minerva, it is true, came forth full 
armed in panoply of mail from the head of Jove. 
But it was from the head of Jove, and not of 
mortal man, that the blue-eyed goddess of wisdom 
sprang in the maturity of perfect deity. All human 
institutions that are destined to last must come up 
from small beginnings. It has taken a century to 
develop our country into a mighty nation and a 


32 


ADDRESS. 


united people. The same century has developed 
the college founded by John Carroll into a great 
and prosperous university, fully competent to 
hold her place among the universities of the 
world. But all is not yet done. There is much 
yet to be done; and you and she must do it. It is for 
you, my friends, to hold up her hands, as those of 
Moses were upheld on the mountains of Amalek, 
while the contest raged on the plains below. The 
war of good and evil, of truth and error, of light 
and darkness, is always raging; and from the 
university must go forth the soldiers that are to 
reinforce the armies of Ormuzd against the ever- 
darkling hosts of Ahriman. 

In the training of the university there is that 
which develops enlightened patriotism, Its phil¬ 
osophy can temper the asperities of political strife, 
wherein to-day lies the greatest danger to civil 
liberty ; and its doctrines can deal successfully 
with all social problems, because they are the prin¬ 
ciples of philosophic truth that is eternal. In the 
system of intellectual and moral philosophy, with 
which our University crowns her course of classi¬ 
cal culture, and for which she claims a just pre¬ 
eminence, there is to be found the saving grace 
that is yet to redeem us from the selfishness of 
political dishonesty, as well as the ravings of an 
insane fanaticism. Even if it be only the chosen 
few that can drink at its Castalian fountains, those 
chosen few must be the poet-priests, whose anthems 
are to stir the world and lead it into the newer 
and better day. 


ADDRESS. 


33 


The hundred years have come—and gone. The 
completion of the first century of the University’s 
existence marks merely the planting of the first 
mile-stone on her broad highway of usefulness. 
We, who are here to witness the ceremony, will 
pass away. Our time is marked by years ; hers 
by centuries. We will pass away; but, let us 
fondly hope, not to be forgotten, if, as men who 
deserved well of her and of our country and of 
mankind, we can link our names to her immortality 
as participators in the celebration of her first Cen¬ 
tennial. 

The hundred years have come—and gone. May 
she survive in all her vigor, unimpaired, when the 
second and the fifth and the tenth century shall 
have rolled away—when all the problems of our 
day shall have been solved, only to give place per¬ 
haps to others of deeper and graver import—when 
from Panama to the Paleocrystic Sea the starry 
flag of freedom shall float in peace over a hundred 
indestructible sovereign States, component parts of 
one great indissoluble Union—when our now an¬ 
tagonistic races shall have been gathered together, 
each in its own local sovereignty, yet bound in the 
bands of one fraternal Confederacy, into which 
even the Mongolian may find admission—when, 
perchance, from yonder observatory hill your as¬ 
tronomers shall flash electric recognition to the 
denizens of “the star of love and dreams,” and 
convey to the celebrants of future Centennials the 
congratulations of those who watch by the canals 
of the red planet Mars. May a thousand and ten 
thousand generations rise to bless her name. 






























































































































- -Ji: 




LC FT. MEADE 



0 019 120 371 




V 






r 


■f r 
























































